The important questions: Has the cinematic car chase become too commonplace, too boring to thrill us?

“I had to do a car chase in The Fury,” Brian De Palma recalls with patent disdain, speaking to Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow in the duo’s recent documentary on the director.

He holds forth contemptuously: “I don’t like car chases. I find them a very boring thing. I’m not a car person. I don’t get excited taking shots of wheels turning or point-of-views out of windshields or cars banging into things. It just doesn’t do anything for me.” The French Connection, De Palma admits, had a superlative one. But why try to outclass perfection? “It’s just ridiculous to even think about doing a car chase now,” he concludes. End of discussion.

When De Palma dismisses the car chase as “ridiculous to even think about doing,” he means that the car chase ought to be beneath consideration for any director seriously concerned with making interesting, original films. Because obviously a great many filmmakers do think about doing car chases – as if speeding, whooshing slabs of metal were the most fascinating objects in the world.

In fact, entire films continue to arrive in multiplexes that seem to be composed of nothing but car chases: what is The Fate of the Furious if not the eighth instalment in a long-running car chase franchise? What are these movies if not feature-length paeans to the glory of vehicular pursuit?

The Fast and Furious films have their virtues; madcap lunacy and conceptual abandon among them. But as we near the 20th hour of Vin Diesel and company giddily zipping and careening across motorways the world over, it’s time perhaps to accept that the language spoken by these movies – that basic visual language of the car chase, familiar from a thousand action movies past – has long since exhausted its novelty.

The car chase is of course designed to be exciting. Indeed, excitement is the car chase’s very raison d’etre, the ambition and the point. But the familiarity of the convention frustrates the effect. The car chase now seems too commonplace to really excite us; too regular to truly thrill.

The modern car chase, as De Palma so derisively suggests, is more or less the same as the car chase of old – only amplified a little (and often rather lazily) by the license of CGI. Whether the cars are zipping around the polar ice caps or hurtling wildly between the skyscrapers of the Middle East, the way the camera captures them racing differs hardly at all. We’re resigned to endure yet more shots of wheels turning, point-of-views out of windshields and cars banging into things — all the visual clichés De Palma bemoaned.

What’s ridiculous about the car chase today isn’t so much the core idea. It’s that the conventions and techniques have been so long overused that the result seems invariably boring. We don’t need the next iteration of the Fast and Furious to be bigger or more spectacular, in other words. We need it to do something about those chases – something interesting, something unfamiliar, something new.

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